


you pull the trigger (I'll be the gun)

by boneoft (dovelines)



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon Temporary Character Death, Canonical Character Death, Catholic Steve Rogers, Grief/Mourning, Guns, Hallucinations, M/M, Steve's Canonically Shit Coping Skills, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-05
Updated: 2019-11-05
Packaged: 2021-01-23 17:36:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21324049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dovelines/pseuds/boneoft
Summary: Steve,he imagines Bucky saying. (Imagines, because Bucky is dead, is dead, is dead because of Steve.)What’re you playin’ at here, punk?Steve's hand lets go of his empty glass and picks up the gun.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 21
Kudos: 109





	you pull the trigger (I'll be the gun)

**Author's Note:**

> I pretty much wrote this all in a single sitting and now only one of my hands is working. hashtag disabled tingz.
> 
> mind the tags <3

Bucky didn’t take his gun with him on the train.

He took some new thing that Howard had cooked up, designed for – for less friction, or something, easier reloading. Steve doesn’t know guns. He knows that Bucky had hefted it in one hand and whistled through his teeth and taken it with him easily, but not what that had meant.

So. It isn’t Bucky’s gun in some ravine in the Alps. It isn’t any of Bucky’s guns, not his sniper not his pistol not his fucking whatever revolver.

Steve takes a drink. It burns like acid all the way down; might as well be.

Bucky’s pistol is sitting on the map table next to the bottle of ethanol Dum Dum had given him, when Steve had told him that he couldn’t get drunk. He still can’t get drunk, even on this, but it hurts a little less and a lot more at the same time, and the fire of it makes it – well. There’s no redemption to be found in pain, but there might be fog. Bucky’s pistol is sitting on the table.

_ Steve, _ he imagines Bucky saying. (Imagines, because Bucky is dead, is dead, is dead because of Steve.) _ What’re you playin’ at here, punk? _Steve’s hand lets go of his empty glass and picks up the gun.

It’s heavier than he expected, smooth and cold against his palms. He can’t smell anything right now but he can almost think he does, gun grease and powder and iron, the way Bucky’s hands always smell. Smelled.

Maybe this big fucking useless body can regenerate a brain stem. The barrel of the gun barely registers when it presses a kiss against his numb mouth.

How fast would he have to die for it to stick?

_ You fuck, _ Bucky swears in his head, and Steve’s going crazy, he’s gone crazy, something in his eyes burns hot and close and bitter and he can’t _ breathe, _ suddenly his head is on the table and the gun isn’t in his hands and his hair is pulling hard and he’s sliding, slipping, losing his footing and his seating and his grip on the world and he’s on the floor and his face is wet and it stings like, like a _ fight. _ Like a _ loss. _

Steve sits there on the floor of the command tent and sobs, deep and heaving, until Peggy comes in for the morning meeting. She holds him gently for too long; she presses his head into her neck where she smells like rosewater, she lets him get her nice blouse filthy with snot and salt. She pulls him up when he starts hiccuping and leads him to her rooms, tucks him into her soft bed, and pulls the blackout curtains. His head aches and his throat is swollen shut – from the crying or the ethanol or some combination of both – so he lets her kiss his temple and closes his eyes into the dark without protest. He doesn’t feel clean for having cried, but he also doesn’t feel, which is better in its own way.

When he gets back to the command tent that evening, both the moonshine and Bucky’s pistol are gone, and Steve is too afraid of answering questions to ask for them back.

–

He thinks about it, with a kind of sour morbidity. He thinks about it kind of a lot; he thinks about it when he should be sleeping, mostly, because during the day there’s enough going on that he can’t drift into his head without risking someone’s ire. Everything is in _ time since Bucky: _ twenty-four hours, twenty-seven hours, thirty-two hours. He holds it close like some swollen, aching pearl, because if he doesn’t, he looks for Bucky at dinner or before bed and then the grief comes slamming through him and splits him down the middle. He mourns, constantly, so he can breathe; he thinks about dying.

The night after someone takes Bucky’s pistol, Steve is sitting on his cot and staring at his shoes, wide-awake from sleeping the afternoon and yet somehow also bone-tired. There’s a horrible little thing inside him that roils, almost angrily: jealous of Bucky for having died, jealous of Bucky for having gone first, bitter at having been left behind. Guilty nausea reaches a hand into Steve’s belly and twists, but he doesn’t have anything in his stomach left to throw up.

The war is still happening. Steve clenches and unclenches his hands in the space between his knees, letting his nails leave little stinging crescents in his palms. The war is still happening, Schmidt is still fighting, Steve is still needed. He says it like a mantra. _ I am still needed. _

(Perhaps not _ that _ needed. If he had fallen – if he had taken Bucky’s place, watched him get smaller from the other side, afraid but selfishly glad – they would have managed, wouldn’t they?)

When he starts thinking about going to find a gun (and it wouldn’t be Bucky’s, but he’d be _ with _ Bucky, and isn’t that what matters?) he shakes and presses his head to the bases of his wrists. _ O Father, _ he starts, but the words stop there. He takes in one deep, shuddering breath, presses against his forehead until the muscles in his neck ache with it, and tries again.

_ O Father, I come to You in this dark hour– _

But he can’t, the prayer catches somewhere in his lungs like glass. If he opened his eyes, he’d be crying. He could find a chaplain, if he wanted; tell the Father about this aching hurt for death, to be where Bucky is, be given some rosaries and told his forgiveness. He doesn’t want to. If he keeps it quiet, keeps it close – well. 

It scares him, in the abstract. In the moment, it’s right.

_ Bucky, _ he tries instead, and that comes easy, so easy that tears leak out of his eyes and into his lashes. _ Bucky, I miss you, it’s too much, I can’t do this, I’m not supposed to be here when you aren’t. I didn’t come into this world until you were here and I was always meant to leave it before you until I went all stupid. This isn’t right, Buck. I’m not supposed to be here. _

This isn’t crying. It’s purging, maybe, tears flowing out and dripping onto his wrists without feeling, as if his body knows how to handle grief but his brain hasn’t quite understood. Steve imagines Bucky sitting next to him, wrapping arms around Steve’s waist, settling his chin on Steve’s shoulder and making those soft, soothing noises he picked up from babysitting his sisters and uses on Steve when Steve’s too deep to wallop him for it. That more than anything is what shatters something in him, and suddenly he’s sobbing aloud, too noisy for how late it is and trying to swallow it in between breaths.

“Y’see, Buck,” he whispers, barely words because his throat won’t work right, but Bucky can hear him. Bucky rubs his back with one hand, grips his hip tightly with the other. “‘M not built right, never was. ‘M supposed to b- to be dead, not you. It’d be settin’ things right, if I died.”

Bucky doesn’t say anything. Steve tips over onto his side and pulls his feet up onto the quilt, boots and all, and Bucky climbs in next to him and lets Steve bury his face in his chest. There’s a judgemental quality to Bucky’s silence, as if trying to tell Steve _ c’mon, you lug, you don’t need to rush home to me. _

But Bucky is dead, and Steve is just imagining him. So he makes Bucky say, “Yeah, Stevie. I’m right on the other side for you, whenever you’re ready,” and he sleeps and he dreams about Hell.

–

He makes plans. 

–

He steals a gun from the armory, another pistol that looks enough like Bucky’s that he knows how to load it, and he hides it in Bucky’s spare jacket underneath his pillow. If they notice it go missing, no one confronts Captain America. They’re closing in on Schmidt, anyway; Captain America has things to do and no need for pistols.

(He steals a grenade, too, just in case. Then another.)

–

They find Schmidt.

–

It’s – it’s almost a _ joke, _ he thinks, hysterically, looking at the cockpit and knowing what’s coming. God looked at him, at what he was planning, and said, no, Steven, I will grant you the honor of a death with purpose.

Peggy is on the radio, Howard is on the radio, Steve barely knows what they’re saying but he knows they don’t want him to die and they don’t realize that this is a miracle, a capital-M Miracle, a death for the greater good with no salvation. He pushes the joystick up as far as it can go and watches the Arctic fill the window darkly.

The crash – crashes. He expected it to go smoothly, for some reason, like a dive; instead it judders harshly through the plane and lurches him forwards in the seat. His head slams into console _ hard. _ The skin splits and his blood is hot, his vision gone momentarily blind. Metal screams ominously in the back of the plane, there is another lurch, another twist, something _ shrieks. _

Freezing water trickles in around the seams of the cockpit windows and comes in a rush from somewhere behind him, deeper in the plane. They starts to sink, slowly at first. It gets dark fast.

Steve undoes the buckle of his seatbelt and lowers himself, shaking and dizzy and breathing heavily through his mouth, to the floor. The water is the coldest thing he has ever felt; it _ hurts, _ it isn’t as painful as the serum but it whites out his brain to sit in it and curl up against the wall.

“Bucky,” he says, and his voice even sounds cold, small and brittle. “Can’t yell at me for this, can ya, jerk?”

The arctic water rises, swirling around his chest. Steve’s fingers are numb, so stiff they won’t respond when he tries to pull himself up against the console. He blinks blood out of one eye and tries to breathe, in, out, the exercises familiar even if the asthma is gone.

“I’m going to drown,” he says aloud to himself, and he chokes as the water reaches his neck. He can’t bring himself to stand up; it would hurt even worse than sitting down had. The wound on his head must still be bleeding, because the blood is so _ fucking hot _ against a backdrop of _ cold. _

The water reaches his mouth. He tips his head back; it’s automatic, a human reflex, even though the air still trapped in the cockpit is going stale as he breathes it. It only saves him seconds, and then the water is over his head. The salt burns angrily at the open gash in his forehead – his lungs burn, too, as if in sympathy, but there’s no respite for either.

–

It takes hours.

–

When Steve wakes up, he thinks he’s in Hell.

That’s the only explanation, at first. He’s awake; he’s warm; there are voices nearby, but none of them are Bucky’s. If Steve were in Heaven, Bucky would be there to greet him.

He opens his eyes and determines: no, this is not Hell. This is Hydra.

–

This is not Hydra. It’s an offshoot of the SSR, something Peggy had made in Steve’s memory or close enough to. He is offered a position, a way to go back to being Captain America. To help people. Steve accepts, because he cannot die, and he does not know how to be anything but a weapon.

(This is not Hydra. He wishes it were Hell.)

**Author's Note:**

> THANK YOU FOR READING!! mwah


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